Videos and Other Media:
Women and Gender Issues

A is for Africa (c2000)

Explores the daily lives and educational aspirations of girls in four African countries.

Africa, Africas (c2001). Director Annamaria Gallone

Fantacocà: presents the cultural phenomenon of skin bleaching in Cameroon and the challenge it is now posing on notions of black pride and identity.

From the other side of the river: documents the effects of war on a community of Ethiopian women and children who were forcibly relocated into refugee camps.

Laafi bala: demonstrates the causes of wide-spread unemployment and poverty in Burkina Faso, where few institutional resources and government support available, and the debilitating effects this is having on women and youth.

Awa: A Mother in West Africa (2002). Director: Alexis Curtis

Portrait of a single mother in Burkina Faso, who supports herself and her six children by cooking and selling rice as a street vendor. Awa narrates her own story, interspersed with interviews of her children, illustrating the economic realities faced by women in the urban areas of West Africa.

Birds of the Wilderness: The Beauty Competition of the Wodaabe People of Niger (2007). Producer: Christopher Roy

"The Wodaabe people of southern Niger, West Africa, hold a beauty competition each fall in which young men paint their faces red and wear costumes of white beads and cloth, with white ostrich feathers in their hats, They are judged based on charm and beauty by the young women of the competing clan. This video includes Wodaabe camp life, the feast before the competition, a young men's initiation, lots of young women, the Ruume dance of welcome, a young man applying his makeup, and lengthy, detailed footage of the Geerewal." - www.createspace.com/2438

Coup de Torchon (c2001). Director: Bertrand Tavernier

After Lucien Cordier, the only police officer in a small African village is ridiculed by the local pimp, cheated on by his wife, and suffers his mistresses being beaten, he begins to get rid of the evil ones in his life.

Dakan (1997)

Dakan is the first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa. Dakan is the first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa. (In French and Mandikan with English subtitles

Female Circumcision: Human Rites (1998). Producer: Marion Mayer-Hohdahl

Documents the ritual of female genital mutilation (female circumcision), practiced among some African groups. This video also explores its roots in myth; and discusses movements underway to ban the practice.

Forbidden Fruit (2000). Director: Sue Malawa Bruce

This docu-drama examines long held taboos about sexual identity and lesbian love in African society.

From sun up (1987)

This film documents the daily life of Tanzanian women as they seek to take their place in their society, as it is influenced through education and the impact of Western civilization.

I have a problem, madam (1995)

Run by female lawyers, FIDA-Uganda has set up several legal aid centers for women in domestic trouble.

In My Country (2004). Director: John Boorman

A Washington Post journalist and an Afrikaans poet strike up a friendship and become romantically involved as they try to come to terms with their feelings about what they've learned at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.

The Life and Times and Sara Baartman: ìThe Hottentot Venusî (1998). Director: Zola Maseko

A documentary film of the life a Khoikhoi woman who was taken from South Africa in 1810 and exhibited as a freak across Britain. The image and ideas for "The Hottentot Venus" (particularly the interest in her sexual anatomy) swept through British popular culture. A court battle waged by abolitionists to free her from her exhibitors failed. In 1814, a year before her death, she was taken to France and became the object of scientific research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality.

A Miner's Tale (2001). Directors: Nicholass Hofmeyr & Gabriel Mondlane

Joaquim is a migrant laborer with a junior wife in urban South Africa and a senior wife and family in rural Mozambique. He is torn between his responsibilities for both. He is also torn between his understanding of his HIV infection when visiting his home village after being absent for four years and what traditional society expects of him. Joaquim must make a choice since the elders are adamant that it is his traditional duty to father more children with his wife, but Joachim does not want to infect her.

Moolaadé (2004). Director: Ousmane Sembene

Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene makes an impassioned plea against the practice of salinde, or female circumcision, in this moving portrait of a society in transition. In a West African village run by uncompromising Muslim males, fiery Colle provides safe harbor for young girls fleeing their "cleansing" rituals. But what one man terms "a minor domestic issue" soon puts the whole town on the verge of bloodshed.

Ndebele women: the rituals of rebellion (1995)

This video explores the Ndebele rituals.

Patience and Pinkie: Mother to Child (c2001). Director: Jane Thandi Lipman

Follows the lives of two pregnant and HIV-positive women fortunate enough to be on a drug trial at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. The film charts the lives of Kholiwe (Patience) and Ntombekaya (Pinkie), who have made friends at the clinic's support group for HIV-positive mothers as they approach the delivery of their babies. It is about their expectations, hopes, and inevitable fears concerning not only the health of their babies, but the trauma around the disclosure of their status to their families and partners as well. It is also about the commitment of the people at the HIV perinatal clinic.

Real Stories from a Free South Africa (2004). Directors: Minky Schlesinger and Khetiwe Ngcobo

Five films showing how the ten years of freedom from apartheid in South Africa have affected the lives of ordinary South Africans since the election of Nelson Mandela in May, 1994. Broadcasting 1, the most widely-watched channel in South Africa, with the support of the National Film and Video Foundation, commissioned fourteen emerging filmmakers to make video portraits of South African society. California Newsreel has chosen five of the fourteen original programs from this experiment in empowering people to tell their own life stories as they are unfolding. Hot wax tells the story of a woman who runs her own beauty salon in Alexandra, serving primarily white clients. Cinderella of the Cape Flats presents the annual Spring Queen Pageant of 2003, for which the women clothing worker participants make their own clothing. Belonging tells the story of a woman born in exile, daughter of political ÈmigrÈs, who struggles to find her own place after she moves to the new South Africa. Umgidi tells of two brothers, their relationship with each other and with their family. One brother wants to accept his roots; the other wants desperately to escape them. Nabantwa Bam' is a case study of the emergence of social classes even within the same South African family, again focusing on two brothers, one who suffers from a debilitating head injury and has been unable to receive the education which would enable him to escape street life, and the other who is the first Black student as his all white school and is now a programmer with a promising career at Microsoft.

Simon & I (2001). Directors: Bev Palesa Ditsie, & Nicky Newman

"Simon and I recounts the lives of two giants in the South African gay and lesbian liberation movement, Simon Nkoli and the filmmaker herself, Bev Ditsie. The story is narrated by Bev, both as a personal statement and a political history. ... their relationship is viewed against a backdrop of intense political activism and the HIV/AIDS crisis"-- Container

Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema (2002). Producer: Beti Ellerson

Interviews of thirty-five women filmmakers from Africa and the African diaspora, interspersed with clips from their films.

South Africa belongs to us (1980)

This intimate portrait of five black women demonstrates how apartheid impoverishes, dehumanizes and ultimately enslaves. It is the clearest introduction to the system of apartheid, its affect on family life and the singular economic and emotional burdens it inflicts upon black people.

Speaking Out: Women, AIDS and Hope (2002). Director: Joanne Burke

Profiles a remarkable HIV and AIDS support project in Bamako, Mali, and three brave women who work tirelessly on behalf of the infected community.

These girls are missing (199-?)

"... in many African countries, fewer than 20% of girls ever enter a classroom, and across the continent, only one woman in three learns to read." "These girls are missing offers small sets of stories, sharp glimpses into a few intimate relationships layered to mirror the complex reality ..."--Container.